Re Education : Issue #25 - Sour, sweet, bitter and spicy : the GBEP story
Why the Gansu Basic Education Project (GBEP) continues to influence
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Introduction
When the media is full of spy stories, trade disputes and accusations of geopolitical rivalry, it may not seem the best time to suggest that those in global education should look closely at China for inspiration.
I think it is – and here’s why.
In 2000 the Gansu Basic Education Project (GBEP) was launched in one of China’s poorest Western provinces, Gansu, in four of its poorest counties. GBEP was a pilot project addressing poverty by testing and scaling new ways of tackling long-standing issues of low access, gender inequity and poor quality in rural education. At the time China accounted for 40% of the world’s poor (that figure is close to zero today).
Aside from being the first UK project to support basic education in China, what was also unique about GBEP was that it was one of the first education system strengthening projects – addressing reform in multiple areas at the same time - and one of the first projects in China to allocate more than a quarter of its funding to training and a quarter to technical support.
The impact of the project during its six-year life was substantial – 14,000 scholarships were given to poor children (70% to girls) ; 6,200 teachers were trained ; a new inspection system was developed ; locally relevant supplementary materials were produced etc. etc.
Results were significant : by the end of the project the four counties demonstrated a dramatic rise in net enrolment rates, from 79% to 91% overall. For minority girls in one county, it rose from 54% to 80%. In another the dropout rate at Grade 1 decreased from 17% to 1.4% and in Grade 3 from 11% to 2%.
But, impressive as those results were, arguably the more interesting story of GBEP is what happened during the project – and continues to this day – in three areas that every education reform project tries to impact : localisation & capacity building, sustainability and scaling. GBEP offers twenty-five years of insights in these areas, and it’s why educators should study it even now.
To give just a few of many examples : even now there is an active Wechat group with over 40 teachers, officials and consultants still discussing, reflecting, celebrating and disseminating GBEP ideas and practices ; in 2021 there was a large-scale reunion, smaller ones happen yearly ; a course on rural education at Beijing University ran in 2021/2 focused heavily on GBEP ; and the project has featured in many articles about rural education in China, including a chapter of a book published only this year.
Nationally, a number of local project experts have worked more widely in Gansu and in other provinces on education reform, expanding and scaling GBEP experience. Internationally, GBEP has had a direct influence on the design of a number of education systems strengthening projects in Nigeria, Tanzania and Pakistan.
A short summary is given here. A fuller, more detailed article can be accessed by clicking the button below.
Andy Brock, November 2025
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好好学习，天天向上
“Study hard and improve every day”. Ubiquitous slogan found in Chinese schools. (Literally - good, good study : day, day up).
Sour, sweet, bitter and spicy : the GBEP story
Background
First, a disclaimer : I was the international Team Leader on GBEP, so I write from experience. Accordingly, take what follows with your critical faculties engaged, but do engage.
GBEP focused on four of the poorest counties in Gansu, each with significant Muslim minority populations : Dongxiang, Hezheng, Kangle and Jishishan. There were 125,000 children and 6,200 teachers in the 700+ primary schools, many of these were remote single classroom rural schools called teaching points. There were 15 initiatives in GBEP - see sample below.
Until GBEP many teachers had not been trained for years, some even decades, and any training they did receive was in the form of lectures. Few headteachers had been trained and community engagement with schools was almost non-existent. Buildings were dilapidated ; inspection was focused on compliance and looking after the poorest most disadvantaged children was not a priority.
So, while the project focused on reforming the system, what was it that led to this long-lasting influence ? What can other countries who are still struggling with some of these issues learn from this experience ?
This summary focuses on three important answers to that question : localisation & capacity building, sustainability and scaling.
Localisation & Capacity Building
The key manifestation of localisation in GBEP was the way in which local educators, from teachers to officials, quickly took on responsibility. They volunteered to be trainers, they helped to write materials and most took their participation as a learning opportunity which would be beneficial personally and might be helpful to their careers.
As a project team we promoted this – we sought out champions and encouraged them, we pushed them forward to take a lead while we supported, rather than vice-versa. Training and consultancy support was front-loaded : in the final year of the project all activities were implemented by local actors with external support being very light touch.
Some strategies happened by lucky accident – for example, local officials had to be co-opted into county training teams for teacher development and school development planning because there weren’t enough resources for external trainers. But, we found that by engaging these “middle tier” officials as trainers some of those traditionally considered gatekeepers of change were turned into poachers !
One official said :
When I review the last six years’ experience in school development planning, there is a mixture of sour, sweet, bitter and spicy. I feel deeply that the process was more important than the result. The process of these six years is the development of ourselves, as well as of schools.
Ten years after the project ended a rare post-project review was undertaken looking at the impact of the project long after completion, examining how many of the changes intended were still observable. One of the issues it highlighted was the continuing influence of the project through those educators who had been involved and had been changed by that involvement.
See also : The making of a champion : Obituary of Wang Guocai
Sustainability
The provincial teacher training authorities were shocked when the international experts said they estimated it would take about nine months to develop new teacher training materials for child-centred learning. “Why would it take so long ?” they said, “We can give it to a professor at Northwest Normal University and have it finished in two months.
A core mantra of GBEP, in fact, what became the unofficial motto, was “the process is as important as the results.” The project prioritised doing things right, not just achieving targets.
The project put together teams of local teachers, university professors, and officials. These teams, guided by experts, developed, then tested, draft materials in real classrooms with real children, and revised them based on feedback. This inclusive, iterative process produced materials that were relevant and effective. Most importantly, the process built long term capacity in those educators to do it again without external support.
In 2017 when the project was reviewed, much of that capacity was still evident. However, some of the initiatives had been changed substantially from what had been designed in the project. For example, the inspection system was quite reduced, and had adopted a numerical scoring which had been strongly resisted by specialists. In some counties participatory teaching approaches had also slipped back to chalk-and-talk.
The lesson drawn from this is that sustainability will happen on local terms no matter what external advisers or funders plan. What external support can do is create the enabling conditions for sustainability by developing systems and processes, and building networks of open-minded individuals. After the end of GBEP, despite much reduced funding for training, many of those individuals found ways to incorporate the new practices into existing systems and budgets.
See also : How Does a Teacher’s Transformation Occur? One teacher’s fascinating reflection on the painful journey of changing practice.
However, although I accepted participatory teaching in theory, my understanding was still superficial, lacking real experience. When I actually used it, I simply copied activity designs from textbooks, which felt like prosthetics that didn’t work well for me.
Scaling
The project had been designed with expansion in mind. A significant part of the project budget was allocated to reflection and dissemination activities which allowed the project to host conferences and working groups, send Gansu personnel to conferences, and visit non-Gansu counties considering educational change.
Within five years of completion GBEP’s key approaches, School Development Planning (SDP) and Participatory Approaches to teaching, were scaled up to a further 36 counties in Gansu, then expanded to 27 more counties in Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi Provinces in the UK-funded Southwest Basic Education Project (SBEP), covering 2.4 million students and 77,000 teachers.
In SBEP only SDP, Participatory Approaches to teaching and Inspection were adopted. Everything else was discarded. This made sense because the resources to support the new initiatives were much reduced and these were the interventions which had gained the most traction among educators. A SBEP Student Achievement Survey found a significant learning outcomes impact resulting from SDP - especially on more disadvantaged schools.
But, the scaling and dissemination did not stop with the end of British aid, nor was it confined to Gansu or western China. Many initiatives took place outside the project or long after it finished. In Gansu, for example, without any project resources GBEP teacher training materials were picked up, adapted and used for all trainee teachers.
Between 2010 and 2012 a Gansu expert led an NGO funded project promoting School Development Planning in eight provinces and hundreds of schools across China. And, one of GBEPs national teacher training advisers designed interactive online teacher training courses for the Ministry of Education’s countrywide National Training Programme, drawing on GBEP’s participatory methods.
Internationally, GBEP’s influence extended through international consultants involved in the project. Some of those led or designed major education projects in Nigeria, Ghana, and Pakistan, applying lessons from Gansu to new contexts, incorporating School Development Planning and participatory teaching.
These and many other unintended consequences, mostly driven by individuals, led to greater scaling of project practices across a much wider and more diverse scale than ever originally envisaged .
See also : The Ripple Effect : a warts-and-all review 10 years after project closure
Conclusion
In the years that followed the end of GBEP the Chinese government embarked on a major drive to improve rural education – with substantial additional funding targeted at rural areas. Gansu found itself in an excellent position to take advantage of this increased support, with significant numbers of teachers and officials who were well trained and prepared to improve rural education.
One of the lessons GBEP surfaces is that the cost-benefit analyses, undertaken as part of project design, tend to underestimate the catalyst effect of effective capacity building. Not only were thousands of children and teachers benefitted through GBEP support (14,000 scholarships, thousands of teachers trained etc.) but, the impact of training and support on officials, master trainers, university professors, consultants, etc. has been positive, profound, long-lasting, but little recorded.
For those designing education interventions in the global south in these times of straitened budgets, the most important lessons GBEP provides are these : if your aim is to effect lasting change, invest widely and repeatedly in training and support. If your aim is to change the education system, co-opt the administrative power of the system (the middle tier) and provide them with continuous support and training. And, if you want to scale your successes to other places, focus on what is really transferable at the cost those places can afford, while investing heavily in materials and dissemination so successes can be shared.
Ultimately, education system reform is built on the changed behaviour of people : teachers, heads, administrators, officials etc. It is only by changing the beliefs, practices and motivations of these groups of people that you can hope to reform institutions and thereby the education system itself.
Well directed and long-term investment in continuous change is almost always worthwhile and holds the additional promise, as GBEP shows, that the benefits may continue to ripple onwards and onwards, outwards and outwards, for decades.
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Select Sources : for full list click button above
Films
Equity in Education (2004) Interim overview of GBEP after 4 years. (16 mins)
Reaching the Unreached (2006). The end of project overview of GBEP (19 mins)
Films from 2017 Review
Escaping Poverty (2017). A film that follows the progress and setbacks of Ma Haimei and Ma Zhengqing (see films above) in 2004, 2010 and 2017. (10 mins)
Gansu Revisited (2017). Documentary film about the project review in 2017 with the lows and highs : no sugar coating. (15 mins)
Reports and Books
Lessons Learned from the Gansu Basic Education Project (2006) The lessons of GBEP, complete with failures, distilled into 85 pages. Relevant to project designers today.
The Ripple Effect (2017) A warts-and-all review of GBEP undertaken ten years after the project ended.
Other reading about education in China
Book Review of “Other Rivers” (2024) Peter Hessler. A very readable, funny and sympathetic portrait of education in China today by the author of “River Town”.
News
Breaking News : A rumour is circulating, unconfirmed but from multiple sources, that Oxford Policy Management (OPM) is following Cambridge Education in closing their education business. Education, once one of the leading sectors in DFID / FCDO, with expertise recognised around the world, is being decimated.
Save the Children Advisory Board has written a letter to the PM, Foreign Secretary and Development Minister urging them to protect support for the education of young people globally. Add your name here.
Euan Wilmshurst has produced a Global Education Events Guide 2026. This is the second year he has done it and it’s fast becoming an indispensable resource. Check it out to see what’s happening in the global education world in 2026. It’s open source so add to it if your event is not listed.
António Guterres, UN Secretary-General has made some trenchant comments on the need to support and fund education. All good stuff, nothing a global educator would disagree with. Are these kinds of statements helpful, do they move any needles anywhere ? What do you think ?
COP30 is almost upon us. This blog on the UKFIET website summarises a session, focusing on education, held between the REAL Centre and Cambridge Partnerships for Education. Education and climate justice: Advancing a shared agenda for COP30 and beyond.
Good to see UNICEF, with support from Edt, ramping up education assistance in Gaza. But, see also this cry for help from Ahmed Issa of Scholarships for Ghazza. Please help if you can, amplify if you can’t.
Development
The Association for Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) held a conference in Accra at the end of last month. Here’s a good summary from the Hempel Foundation and another from Ben Piper.
Duncan Green has a good article called “Aid risks being increasingly confined to countries where it doesn’t work – what to do?” He argues that as aid diminishes it will increasingly be focused on the poorest and most complex countries, places where it’s difficult to get results because government itself is dysfunctional. Embedded within the article is a session with Claire Short, Kevin Watkins and Deborah Doane. Worth checking out.
AI Spy
A new sub-section as there is so much on AI and education now.
Apparently, Nigerians and Ghanaians are amongst the most enthusiastic users of AI.
Nelson Uzenabor posts about the cultural bias of Chat GPT (you guessed : (Western Europe).
Anurag Shukla raises an eye-brow at Michael Bloomberg, of all people, urging “Wait ; AI Should Stay out of Schools”. Shukla cites the State of Kerala and Sal Khan of Khan Academy as examples of those joining an increasingly vocal group.
“Now, AI can help you improve the candle. It will be the brightest ever, burn the longest, be very cheap and amazing looking, but it will never develop to the lightbulb,” he says. “To get from the candle to a lightbulb you need a human who is good at critical thinking, someone who might take a chaotic, unstructured, unpredictable approach to problem solving”. (Michael Gerlich quoted in Sophie McBain’s article in The Guardian : Are we living in a golden age of stupidity ?)
Amahra Spence, summoning her inner Freire, has this nicely written summary of AI / social media content.
The classroom is no longer bounded by school walls. It is in the endless scroll of TikTok, the algorithmically curated newsfeed, the AI-generated content that reproduces bias while claiming objectivity at an accelerated speed. Misinformation circulates faster than fact; outrage travels further than care. Political opportunists exploit these dynamics, normalising fascist rhetoric under the guise of “common sense”, pragmatism or patriotism. In such a landscape, education must be more than instruction: it must be training in discernment, in critical consciousness, in the courage to confront what is hidden.
Voices from the front
A recent news article has this intriguing quote about education in Laos, but no detail. Mobilising the army to advance education, do we need more of this attitude ? !
To address teacher shortages and reduce dropout rates in remote areas, the government will deploy volunteer soldier-teachers to underserved regions.
On October 19, President Peter Mutharika announced that starting in January 2026, both primary and secondary school education in Malawi will be free. Malawi is already struggling with the quality of education - let’s hope this is not simply more children in school not learning.
Nirmal Patel reports on how an AI assessment software was used to evaluate 10,000 handwritten exams in Rajasthan.
Great little video interviewing three girls in the Manahel Programme, Syria, one year apart. Inspiring.
Voices from the rear
(Gray and Published Research)
Noam Angrist, Claire Cullen and Janica Magat have published a paper using A/B testing to determine the best technology-based tutoring at scale for numeracy programmes. Even if you’re short of time the introduction alone should get you thinking, or calculating.
A new paper shedding light on how researchers of inclusion in education demonstrate inclusion in their own research. Who inspects the inspectors ? (Imperfectly) inclusive ways of knowing: Principles and practices for researching inclusively in the field of international education and development – An exploratory scoping review. Authors : Buckler, Ebubedike and Agbaire.
Lisandro Martin and Luis Benveniste in World Bank Blogs have a nod to Milan Kundera : “The unbearable lightness of promises”. It’s another outcomes matter / data matters / politics matters piece - but concisely and nicely written.
Good challenge from Kevin Brown on the imbalance of global philanthropy (echoes of last month’s Issue on the extreme inequality of global wealth). His post has a shocking statistic - there are 86,000 philanthropic organisations in Europe / N America and just 47 in Africa.
Children struggle to read because of outdated teaching, study says. Andrew Jack in the FT on the GEEAP study launched at ADEA in Ghana advocating for improved methods of foundational literacy.
And finally
In this month of Remembrance for those who have died in WWI and WWII the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of African and Asian soldiers and labourers is often overlooked or underplayed.
Casualty data is sketchy for military personnel and even more so for labourers. Many Chinese labourers in Europe most likely died of Spanish flu shortly after the end of the First World War - probably including Gao Lao Niu, the labourer whose headstone appears below. His grave is one of 36 Chinese in this cemetery.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them
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